Try this sometime....
Play Poem Electronique faster than it's recorded, then put on Pink Floyd's "Several Species of Small Furry Beasts Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict". You may notice some similarities.

ah, Varese. Did you know that along with being a breakthrough composer that he was a child molester ? His wife blocked all publication of his memoirs and biographies because she did not want his reputation tarnished...

I think maybe we should discuss the First School of Italian Futursism to put Varese in the proper perspective. Russolo, Marinetti, et al.

Varese. Did he use the siren and the anvil for sonic purposes only or did he subscribe to the Russolian belief that we must embrace the industrialized world with all of its great machines and immortalize(in compositions) the sonic emminations of these industrial giants produced ?

Originally posted by DonZ
Varese. Did he use the siren and the anvil for sonic purposes only or did he subscribe to the Russolian belief that we must embrace the industrialized world with all of its great machines and immortalize(in compositions) the sonic emminations of these industrial giants produced ?

Click to expand...

The first option, I think.

Here is a text about Varèse's sonic explorations that is way better worded than anything I could come up with :

Why this obsession with sound? Of all contemporary composers, perhaps Varèse best clarified this,
and not only in his music but in words. He defined music as "organized sound" and frequently
spoke of "pure sound." He was not interested in the relatively abstract notions of modes or
variations or harmonic progressions. He was concerned with the physical and sensual immediacy of
sound itself. Sound was his raw material, his point of departure. His jagged rhythms grew out of
whatever sonorities he was working with, and even the formal shapes of his pieces evolved out of
this material rather than out of any intellectual formal ideas. Varèse's way of working was strictly
intuitive, and somewhat mystical. He spoke of a new dimension in music which he called "sound
projection," which he defined as "that feeling that sound is leaving us with no hope of being
reflected back, a feeling akin to that aroused by beams of light sent forth by a powerful
searchlightfor the ear as for the eye, that sense of projection, of a journey into space" (New
Instruments and New Music, from a lecture given at Mary Austin House, Santa Fe, New Mexico, in
1936).
Chou Wen-chung, in his excellent article "Asian Music and Western Composition" in the Dictionary
of Contemporary Music, clarifies Varèse's attitude and also draws an arresting parallel with Asian
musical principles:

Varèse's concept of music as organized sound and of sound as living matter,
which in itself is of historic consequence, is again a modern Western parallel of a
pervasive Chinese concept: that each single tone is a musical entity in itself, that
musical meaning lies intrinsically in the tones themselves, and that one must
investigate sound to know tones and investigate tones to know music. This
concept, often shrouded in poetic and mystic metaphors, is fundamental to many
Asian musical cultures. It is manifest in the great emphasis placed on the
production and control of tones, often involving an elaborate vocabulary of
articulations, modifications in timbre, inflections in pitch, fluctuations in intensity,
vibratos, and tremolos, as in chin music.

Click to expand...

Also, according to Varese quotes in the liner notes of my CD featuring Amériques and Arcana, these pieces, while evocative, are not meant as illustration nor as a "transfert into the realm of the orchestra" of the casual, "secular" sounds. Un fortunately I don't have the CD here so I can't give you the full quotes. Let's not forget as well that Varèse had an electroaccoustician engineer formation, he was more into the technical rather than political side of his art.

Actually it looks like Varèse's ambitions and explorations go well beyond the Italian Futurists rather funny but clogged in controverse ideas - if you've read Russollo's seminal letter to Pratella, "The art of noises", you know what I mean : while the core is interesting, it looks like he is more into rebelling against whatever existed before rather than building solid foundations of a radically new musical form.